Current reference pierce oscillator circuit topology for low phase noise MEMS SAW oscillator / Fazli Lut, Norlizawati Kamarudin and Jamilah Karim

This paper presents the design and simulation
of a current reference Pierce oscillator circuit topology for
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based oscillator.
The designed amplifier achieves a gain of 33 dB at VDD of
1.2V. The amplifier core was tested with surface-acousticwave (SAW) resonators range from 800MHz to 2.4 GHz to
form an oscillator and it shows a phase noise level range of
-146 dBc/Hz to -151 dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset frequency.
This satisfies the maximum requirements phase noise of
local oscillator (LO) of ultra-high frequency (UHF) for
Bluetooth technology and Global System for Mobile
Communications (GSM). The device produced a better
figure-of-merit (FoM) when compared with other
oscillators that were based on CMOS on-chip inductor and
capacitor (CMOS LC), film bulk acoustic resonator
(FBAR) and lateral-field-excited (LFE) Aluminium Nitride
(AIN) contour mode resonators technologies. The oscillator
circuit has been simulated using a 0.13µm CL130G CMOS
technology process from Silterra (Malaysia) with the
oscillator core consuming only 1.07mW DC power.